Talking to Myself Again

Lando Falls Down, Goes Boom!

mood: relieved
music: quiet whir of the fan blades

Well, Saturday had a bit more excitement than we had expected -- or wanted.

Dawn's parents, Noel & Lois, drove in from New Mexico for a visit. (No, that wasn't the unwanted excitement.) We met them at Panera Bread for lunch, then went back to our house for more visiting and playing with Lando. We spent most of the afternoon outside in the yard, watching Lando play with the neighbor kids (Brooke, Brock, and Nick). Actually, we spent a bit *too* much time outside, because we all got a little sunburned.

The unwanted excitement came when something happened and Lando got hurt. As in "drive to the Emergency Room" hurt. I was in the garage, making a futile attempt at cleaning it up, and Dawn was inside talking with her parents. Then I heard Brooke asking Lando what was wrong and was he alright. Lando was crying and holding his right arm.

I wasn't sure what had happened, but I knew that earlier Lando had been climbing over the top of Brooke (who was sitting on this small trampoline of ours), so I figured it was likely that he had fallen off and landed on his arm.

My suspicion was a sprained or broken wrist, so I sent the kids home and carried Lando into the house. I sat for a couple of minutes holding Lando in my lap while we examined his arm and waited to see whether it would stop hurting.

It didn't.

So it was off to the Emergency Room! Actually, it was off to Memorial ExpressCARE, which is closer and generally faster. Lando assured us that he didn't need to go to the doctor. He said that it would be all better in 2 days. Later he changed his prognosis and said that it would be all better in 2 hours. However, he did not change his recommendation against going to the doctor.

We went anyway.

When we asked Lando what happened, he said (version #1) that he tripped on a stick and fell down. Dawn then told him that when she was young, she was roller skating and the roller skates hit a rock, causing her to fall and break her wrist. Lando then changed his story and said (version #2) that he had tripped on a rock and fell down. We corrected him, but he insisted that, no, it was a rock. (We live in central Illinois. We don't have any rocks here. We have to import rocks from exotic places like Tennessee.)

So we got to ExpressCARE and the nurse began to examine him. Lando was generally fine, except when his arm was moved, at which point he started crying again. When the nurse asked him where it hurt and pointed at his wrist, he told her that (version #1) the wrist was what hurt. When she pointed at his elbow, he stuck to his story -- wrist. Later, the doctor came him and asked him where it hurt, pointing to his wrist and then his elbow. Lando insisted (version #2) that it was the elbow that hurt. I told the doctor that Lando had told that nurse that it was his wrist that hurt.

So the doctor said that Lando's wrist would need to be X-rayed. Lando had 2 questions about this: (1) Would he have to get a shot? and (2) Would it be loud? (Lando is very afraid of loud noises. Whenever we run the vacuum cleaner, we warn Lando so that he can barricade himself in his bedroom.)

Reassured that getting an X-ray would involve neither needles nor noises, we went off with the X-ray tech. I'd been holding Lando in my lap the entire time, from when we got out of the car until we entered the X-ray lab. The tech said that I could continue to hold him, and while I was doing so she also had me support one end of the X-ray film under Lando's wrist -- a rather precarious balancing act! Lando was fine with the first exposure. Then the tech rotated his wrist at a 45 degree angle for the second exposure, which caused Lando to cry a bit. Then she rotated his wrist at a 90 degree angle for the third exposure, which Lando really didn't like! Worse yet, when she checked the exposures, she found that we needed to redo the third one. Poor guy! At last it was all over and I carried Lando back to the doctor's office.

When the doctor came in, he said that he couldn't see anything broken on the X-rays, but that he wasn't an expert at reading the X-rays of kids as young as Lando, so he would have to send them to Memorial to be read.

Then the doctor examined Lando's arm again, and this time came to the conclusion that version #2 of Lando's story was the correct one -- it was Lando's elbow that was really hurting, not the wrist.

They hadn't X-rayed the elbow.

*sigh* When we told Lando that we were going to have to do more X-rays, he again cried and asked us 2 questions: (1) Would he have to get a shot? and (2) Would it be loud? (I would have thought that "Will it hurt?" would have ranked higher on the list of questions. I guess that just shows that I'm not a 3-year-old.)

I carried Lando back to the X-ray lab, but this time he needed to be lying down on the (cold hard metal) table. Lando was not happy about this! Dawn and I both donned lead-lined aprons, and while Dawn tried to hold his arm still, I struggled to hold his legs and the rest of his body down. As before, there were 3 exposures -- prone, 45 degree angle, and 90 degree angle. And as before he really didn't like the 90 degree angle one!

After we were done, however, the X-ray tech said that, when she rotated his arm for the 90 degree angle shot, she felt something pop, like perhaps a bone in his elbow had popped back into place.

Could it be that Lando had nursemaid's elbow? What a relief that would be! Lando had been to the E.R. before with nursemaid's elbow, back when he was 18 months old. The name comes from someone (e.g. the child's nursemaid) grabbing onto the child's arm to stop them from running away or to lift them up, at which point a bone in the elbow pops out of its socket, due to young children having ligaments that are extremely flexible.

Then the X-ray tech handed Lando a toy -- and Lando reached out with his injured right arm to take it!

*Phew!*

To say that I was relieved is an understatement. There's nothing quite like the feeling of holding your young son in your lap while he's in pain and there's nothing you can do about it. (Plus, I was dreading the prospect of weeks of Lando with his wrist and/or arm in a cast or sling. Lando is Mister Energy, and telling him that he couldn't use his right hand for a few weeks was not appealing!)

When Lando had nursemaid's elbow before, we took him to the E.R. The doctor who examined him then recognized what was wrong, held Lando's arm in his hands, did a little maneuver, and instantly Lando stopped crying! It was amazing! No X-rays required or anything. I suppose it's possible that if we had taken Lando to the E.R. rather than to Memorial ExpressCARE, we might have gotten a doctor who recognized the symptoms and was able to take care of them sooner. Who knows?

We still don't know what really caused it. One possibility is that Lando tripped over a stick and fell, as he said, then one of the kids tried to lift him back up by pulling on his arm. Another possibility is that one of the kids tried to stop Lando from running by grabbing his arm and then Lando pulled free, tripped, and fell. We'll probably never know for sure.

When we got home, the neighbor kids' dad came over to find out what happened and whether his kids were responsible. He said that all he knew was that as soon as he got home, his kids were telling him that Lando got hurt while playing with them. :-) I assured him that Lando was okay and explained my theories about what might have happened. I'm sure none of them deliberately hurt Lando, and Lando tends to be enough of a rough and tumble kid that it wouldn't surprise me at all if one of the kids tried to grab Lando by the arm (pop!) or pull him back up after he fell (pop!).

In any case, that was the big unwanted excitement of the weekend!

Train Expo

mood: happy
music: silence

Three posts in one day! What a startling turn of events!

On Sunday, April 6, Lando and I went to the model railroad show at the Crowne Plaza. (Dawn stayed home and enjoyed some alone time! Actually, I think she did housework. Well, she was alone.)

When we walked through the doors, I hadn't even paid yet before Lando was sprinting toward the tables, pointing with eyes wide at the model trains running around the tracks. Surprisingly, when I barked at him to wait, he actually stopped, continuing to point at the trains and eagerly calling to me to come look at them.

We wandered around for about an hour looking at things. The event was originally scheduled to be held in the Illinois Building at the State Fairgrounds, but the ongoing electrical work there meant that they had to quickly find a new location.

I had to remind Lando repeatedly not to touch anything, but actually he was very good. He needed the reminders, but after being reminded he would keep his hands to himself.

In situations like this, Lando always has this very serious, intense look of concentration on his face. Although it might not look it, believe me, he was in heaven!

There were just 2 things that Lando wanted. (Well, there were many other things that Lando wanted, but he accepted "no" for an answer on those.)

One booth had a box of old Hot Wheels cars. Lando has scores of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, so when he eagerly started going through that box, I figured we were destined to walk out with more. However, he surprised me by picking out 3 plastic figurines instead -- one of Daffy Duck, the other 2 of Fraggle Rock characters. When I asked the dealer how much, he told me just to take them! How nice!

So, with Daffy Duck and Fraggle Rock characters in hand, we set off to find more treasures.

That's when Lando saw the bags of plastic beads in the shape of train engines. Lando has quite a few beads and he had been so good that when he asked for them, I agreed. We bought the bag of beads and then left the show.

When we got to the car, I learned why Lando had wanted the beads -- he thought they were fruit snacks! (If you don't have young kids and don't know what the term "fruit snacks" means, think "gummi bears". Any resemblance to real fruit is purely hallucinatory.) Luckily I had brought some other fruit snacks with us, so he reacted gracefully to the news that the colorful little train engines were not edible.

Playground Football

mood: calm
music: birds singing outside in the sunshine, where I should be

Two posts in a single day! Will wonders never cease? Here's another in my ongoing push to get caught up to the present. (Although I seem to fallen 15 days behind. Hmm....)

On Saturday, April 5, we took Lando to the playground at Rotary Park. It was fairly warm, but a bit windy and wet. This was potentially a play date for the Springfield Mom's Meetup, but nobody else showed up. Oh well. We had fun anyway.

When we got there, we saw lots of kids playing football and soccer. (We later learned that Riley, one of our neighbors, was one of the football players.) Lando wanted to join in the fun, of course. He didn't quite get the concept of having to be on a team to play. Luckily we were able to distract him enough with the playground that it wasn't a big issue. It also helped that Dawn had brought along one of Lando's footballs, so she and Lando had lots of fun chasing each other around while I took pictures. (No, I still haven't posted them.)

So that was April 5. Exciting, huh? Let's see if anything more exciting happens next time!

Ratatouille and the French Paradox

mood: calm
music: distant sound of "The Heffalump Movie"

One thing I forgot to mention before is that, now that Lando is going to sleep earlier (finally!), Dawn & I have been able to watch a couple of DVDs. We have a very long row of DVDs accusingly staring out at us from their shrinkwrap packaging. "Why did you even bother buying us?" they ask. "What a waste of money!"

Well, we've finally been able to start watching some. Back on April 4, we watched Ratatouille, a Pixar animated film about a rat that loves cooking (and eating) good food. I had just picked up my first dozen eggs from the James Family Farm, so I felt it was an appropriate choice for that evening.

One thing I noticed was that the French chef was depicted as being extremely fat. While I'm sure there are many fat chefs in France, there is also something called "the French paradox." Traditional French cuisine involves eating high fat foods, yet the French have significantly lower rates of heart disease and obesity when compared to the U.S. population.

One possible explanation is that the French tend to drink wine with their meals. The theory is that there is something in the wine that protects the heart. This idea has gotten plenty of publicity, presumably because it's attractive ("Hey! We get to drink wine!"), it's easy to understand ("More wine. Got it."), it doesn't involve a change in lifestyle ("I don't have to change the way I eat or exercise more? Sweet!"), and it can be profitable ("Wine: It Does Your Heart Good!™").

There's another idea, however, that is more complex. Michael Pollan suggests in his book In Defense of Food that perhaps the source of the French paradox isn't just one thing. Perhaps it is the combinations of food that the French eat, the way that they eat, and the quantity. Traditionally, the French tend to eat smaller portions; a wider variety of foods; fewer processed foods; and at a more leisurely pace. And French cuisine has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Pollan suggests that traditional cuisines might have evolved the way they have simply because they turned out to be healthier. The U.S., by contrast, has never really had much of a traditional cuisine, perhaps in part because we have been a melting pot of displaced peoples.

No, a hamburger and French fries does not qualify as a traditional cuisine, simply because we've only been eating this way since about World War II. Today, much of the rest of the world is starting to adopt the "fast food" cuisine of the U.S. As a result, the health problems of the U.S. are showing up in other countries. In fact, it was the opening of a McDonald's on the Piazza di Spagna near the Spanish Steps in Rome that led to the creation of the Slow Food movement.

Anyway, there isn't really a purpose to this post, other than to point out the irony of an American film portraying a French chef as being grossly overweight. (Although, in their defense, the other French characters in the film were not fat. So perhaps this post had no purpose whatsoever!)

Eggcellent Adventure

mood: adventurous
music: silence

I'm still trying to get caught up to the present here. So far, I'm up to Friday, April 4!

In another act of boldness, on Friday, April 4, I bought some eggs. Okay, that doesn't sound bold. How about this: I took some eggs without paying for them! And one of them was a duck egg!

Okay, before you go calling the cops, let me explain.

I've been on this locavore kick ever since reading Plenty (and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, and starting on Fast Food Nation, and watching King Corn and Super Size Me). Of course, what I really mean by that is that I've been thinking "I need to eat more local food." Examples of actually doing so, however, have been limited. Winter in central Illinois is not exactly harvest time.

At the grocery store we've bought: honey that came from Mackinaw Valley Apiaries in Mackinaw, Illinois (about 60 miles north of Springfield); eggs from Phil's Fresh Eggs that came from northern Illinois (about 150-200 miles north of Springfield); and jam that came from Kathy's Kitchen in Virginia, Illinois (about 30 miles northwest of Springfield). But we hadn't gotten anything really local, direct from the farmer. (We've bought a CSA share from Hill Street Farm in Modesto, Illinois (about 50 miles southwest of Springfield), but we don't start getting any food from that until May 17.)

Via the Local Harvest web site, I found that the James Family Farm near Sherman, Illinois sells eggs direct to the public. Imagine that -- you can go to a farm and buy food! Ah, the wonders of the modern world!

Actually, that last statement isn't entirely sarcasm. It turns out that, not too long ago, it was illegal in the U.S. for a farmer to sell their food directly to the public. I kid you not. Of course, I can't find the citation now (typical!), but I think it was sometime in the 1970s that Federal legislation was passed allowing farmers to bypass distributors and sell direct the the public. What a concept!

Anyway, the James Family Farm is located 7 miles from where I work, so I decided to go there after work to at the very least locate it and possibly also buy some eggs. (Mary, this is 0.8 miles from your house. FYI.)

I drove east on Andrew Road, looking for a sign that says "James Family Farm". I didn't see one. What I did see is a mailbox with the number "3750" on it. That's their street address! Of course, I missed it on the first pass and had to turn around. (I waved at your house, Mary. Did you see me?) When I went back, I saw a small gravel road/driveway going back through the trees. There was an iron gate, but no sign to indicate that this led to a farm.

I followed the gravel road anyway, and before long it emerged from the trees and I saw... cows! Chickens! A barn! Dogs and pickup trucks and kids and well, all the things that you would expect to see on a real farm, as opposed to what you get (but never go to see) on a factory farm. There were cows grazing on grass, and there was a chicken coop with a couple dozen hens roaming around outside in the sun. These were real free-range, cage-free eggs.

(Incidentally, if the eggs you buy at the grocery store say "free-range", that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. If it comes from an "industrial organic" factory farm, it probably means that the chickens live in a massive building with hundreds or thousands of other chickens, but that there is a small door that leads outside to a tiny strip of grass. This door is kept closed for the first 6 weeks of their life, to protect them from disease. As a result, they generally never realize that they have the option of going outside.)

I walked up on the porch, knocked on the door, and Andrea answered. When I told her that I was interested in buying some eggs, she said that they were just about to go out to the chicken coop and get some. Talk about fresh! So while we talked, she sent her kids out to get the eggs.

There was just one problem: I had no cash with me. Debit card? Yes. Cash? No. When I told her this, she told me not to worry about it. She said that she'd never had someone buy eggs from her that didn't come back, and that I could pay her next time. When was the last time your supermarket chain told you that? Michael Pollan has a wonderful expression in his book In Defense of Food: "Shake the hand that feeds you." Well, now I've done that. Or at least one of them.

When the kids came back, in addition to the chicken eggs, they also had some duck eggs. Andrea asked me whether I had ever eaten a duck egg. When I told her I hadn't, she insisted I take a duck egg -- for free.

While I was talking to her, there was another woman there who was, I think, picking up some milk. She asked me how I had heard of the farm and I said I found it on the Internet, via Local Harvest, and had been reading Andrea's blog postings. Andrea said she had wondered whether anyone was reading that. She had received some comments from some readers in California, but those obviously weren't her target audience!

Here's an example of Andrea's writing, from an entry called Seasonality:

Nowhere are the seasons more evident than on a farm. December and January have been spent in a kind of peaceful hominess. We don’t really go anywhere and we don’t plan anything. When it gets dark we read and shut out the lights by eight o’clock. We sleep in too. The world is dark longer and we all respond in kind by allowing our bodies to go with the natural rhythms of light and dark.

Winter is story time. It is time to rest and time to dream. We dream of warm days to come, planning what we will plant and imagining our harvest. We dream of the far away places that our stories take us. Back in time and forward sometimes too, our books carry our thoughts to places beyond our four walls. We don’t listen to the radio and we don’t subscribe to television. Our days in the winter always end with several chapters of our most recent book, our latest adventure. After dinner, everybody grabs a blanket and pillow, cuddling on the couch, on the floor or beside the reader in the reading chair, and we read.

This is, I think, a perfect ending to a winter day. When it’s cold, the wood stove will be warm and cheery. After story time, the bed will be cold when we slide in between the heavy blankets. It is so simple, I hate for it to end.

(Go read the whole thing. I'll wait.... Nice writing, huh? Sort of makes me want to quit my job and go live on a farm. But only sort of.)

I asked Andrea how long they had been there and she said about 3 years. The house is a converted barn and has a gorgeous great room, with a tall vaulted ceiling, lots of windows, and big wooden beams. I immediately coveted it! However, I contented myself with leaving with my baker's dozen of eggs, unpaid for until next time.

Dawn and I decided to try the eggs in omelets. I had never cooked an omelet before. Dawn doesn't eat eggs very often, nor had she ever cooked an omelet, but she at least had eaten omelets before. I'd never even done that.

I decided to experiment using the last of the eggs from Phil's Fresh Eggs, so I cooked two cheese omelets, one for Dawn and one for myself. That went reasonably well, and Dawn said it tasted good, so the next day I was ready to try my fresh eggs!

But first, of course, I had to take some pictures. Look! Real farm fresh eggs! And a duck egg! (What? Oh, you can't see the pictures. Yeah, I still haven't posted them. *sigh* But back to the story.)

I decided to be a bit more daring for my second ever attempt at cooking omelets and to try cooking mine with sautéed onions. Of course, I'd never sautéed anything before, either. Dawn was a bit more familiar with that, however, and gave me some advice. That worked reasonably well. Unfortunately, I tried flipping my omelet a little too early, so it tore open (oops), but it tasted good anyway.

Later that weekend I tried just regular scrambled eggs (very good). I also gave the duck egg a try. In addition to being slightly large than a chicken egg and having a very smooth shell, Andrea said that a duck egg is made up of mostly yolk. Sure enough, when I cracked it into a bowl, I saw a significantly larger yolk than I'm used to. I decided I would try it just soft fried. I don't fry eggs very often (I prefer scrambled), so I'm not very good at it. As a result, the white was slightly overdone. It tasted good anyway, however. Truthfully, I couldn't tell any difference in the taste between it and a chicken egg. Perhaps next time I'll try scrambled duck eggs.

Anyway, by Monday morning I was down to 3 eggs, so after work I drove out to the James Family Farm again to pay for my previous dozen and to buy another. We've slowed the rate at which we're consuming this next dozen, of course. I expect I'll generally try to pick up eggs on Fridays, since I usually have more time to make breakfast on the weekends than during the week.

My next action will be to place an order for chickens. I hadn't realized it until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, but traditionally people would eat beef and pork in the late fall and winter (when the animals were fat), then eat chicken during the summer. The James Family Farm will have chicken for pickup in late-May, late-July, and late-September. I'm guessing that I might eat 2 chickens over the course of 2 months, so I'm going to order 2 and see whether my guess was correct. (Yes, we have a freezer. Ironically, we bought it because we were ordering so much from Schwan's. Now we're starting to eliminate Schwan's and buy local.)

So that's the conclusion of this episode of "Wally Buys Food"! Tune in next time when Wally... uh... buys more food.

Devolution at Work, Evolution on Nova

mood: nostalgic
music: wind

In my previous post, I finished off March. Rather than doing one long post that covers the first part of April, I'm just going to do one day per post. So, without further adieu, here's Tuesday, April 1!

Happy April Fool's Day! I have nothing funny to relate about that.

Devolution at Work

Short version: In a few months, I will no longer be working at the EPA. No, that's not an April Fool's joke.

Long version: Well... You know what, the long version would just be way too long.

Medium version: The government of the State of Illinois consists of numerous agencies, boards, departments, etc. In the past, each of those organizations has had their own IT people, their own HR people, their own legal department, their own PR people, etc. Because the State is short on money, they've been trying to improve efficiency by combining things. This is called "Shared Services". Well, on March 31, the Governor signed an executive order creating a Shared Services organization that would house all of the IT people for the various environmental and economic development agencies.

Effective June 1, the IT departments of the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and 3 other groups, will all be merged together into the Environment & Economic Development portion of the Shared Services Program. After that date, I'll technically no longer be an employee of the Illinois EPA, although I'll probably still continue to physically be located there for awhile. Eventually, we'll all be housed at the Illinois Department of Transportation building over on Dirksen Parkway.

Part of me is quite glad this is happening. At the Illinois EPA, our group was being deliberately killed off by upper management for several years. Whenever people would retire or leave, they wouldn't be replaced. Development of new software was happening in the bureaus, rather than in IT; we were relegated to maintenance. Our budget was zero dollars -- literally. New hardware would be purchased for the secretaries in the bureaus before we would ever get anything. (Do I sound bitter?)

There was a time when our division had 50 employees. We're now down to about a dozen, of which only 7 are programmers. Of those, 2 have been actively looking for jobs elsewhere, 1 will be retiring by the end of the calendar year, and another will be retiring in 3 years. Our youngest programmer is probably 35 years old.

Three years ago, I predicted that our division would be gone in 5 years. It looks like I was off by about 1½ years.

The last few years have been very frustrating. Non-programmers generally don't realize this, but programming is a creative process. By that I mean both that you are creating something, much as a builder does in building a house, and that you are expressing a little bit of yourself through the design process. When you're done, you can show someone your program and say, "I did that!" You can point out some feature and say, "I thought of that!"

But that creative process pretty much can only happen when you are allowed to create things. When all you're allowed to do is maintain existing software -- a task normally given to beginning programmers to keep them out of trouble until they've learned the ropes -- programming stops being a creative process and instead becomes drudgery.

So, because of the slow death our division was being put through, a part of me is quite glad to see that it will soon be over. Hopefully the end result of all of this will be additional opportunities for us to once again create something.

However, another part of me is sad. I've worked for the Illinois EPA my entire adult life, starting May 1, 1986. (I was leaving after taking a placement test for a State job when I heard the news that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.) For several years, I kept saying that I would stick around for 2 more years and then I would seek work in the private sector, but I never did. Now, having worked for the State of Illinois nearly 22 years, I had expected that I would work for the Illinois EPA until I retired. Being a pro-environment kind of guy, I always sort of liked the idea that I was doing something for the environment (even though in reality I had nothing to do with any of the actions or decisions that would actually have any effect on the environment).

I would rather have seen a revitalized IT department at the Illinois EPA. Since it had become obvious that that wasn't going to happen, I'm glad to see that it will finally be put out of its misery. Whether my time as a member of the Environment & Economic Development Shared Services Program turns out any better remains to be sign. Stay tuned!

Evolution on Nova

That evening, at REALL's monthly meeting, we watched "Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial", an episode of Nova about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. (That was the trial about an attempt to provide students in science classes in Dover, Pennsylvania with information about Intelligent Design.) It was quite interesting, and although I was already fairly familiar with the case, I learned several things that I didn't already know (including some stuff about recent evidence for evolution). Incidentally, you can watch the program online.

Don't you just love the Internet?

Whoosh! That was March. (Part 2)

mood: happy
music: silence

In my previous post (just days ago!), I recapped the first 19 days of March. Here are the remaining dozen.

Thu, Mar 20 - Spring!

It's the Vernal Equinox, aka the first day of spring! Goodbye, winter! Actually, the winter felt fairly short to me, but I was very happy to see it go. For one thing, warmer weather means we can get our energetic 3-year-old son outside to burn up some of that energy! For another, warmer weather means local veggies will be available soon, which means I can start getting a bit more serious about the 100-mile diet.

Fri, Mar 21 - Alien Abduction

Dunno. Woke up, went to work, came home.

Sat, Mar 22 - Major News! Lando Sleeps!

About this time, we did two things: We abandoned Lando's afternoon nap; and we moved up his bedtime to an earlier hour. Lo and behold, suddenly bedtimes became much easier! Before, we were spending an hour to get him to take his nap, then spending 2 hours (or more!) to get him to fall asleep at night! As a result, he usually wouldn't fall asleep until 11:00 PM or later.

We eliminated his nap, then started taking him straight from dinner, to bath, to bed by 7:00 PM, and suddenly he's falling asleep by 8:00! And without the crying and yelling and running about that would generally precede his later bedtimes!

We actually have free time in the evening! Wow! This is a major, major deal for us!

Now if we can just get him potty trained. And get him to start eating meals. And start cleaning up his toys. And stop chasing the cat. And... well, generally get him to have the maturity of a grownup but still be an adorable 3-year-old boy.

Sun, Mar 23 - Easter! Candy! Easter Candy!

Happy Easter! Yes, we're atheists, but did you really think Dawn would pass up a holiday that involves eating chocolate? Actually, Easter was never much of a holiday in our house when I was growing up, but Dawn's dad was raised Catholic, so I'm guessing that's why it was more of a big deal for them -- at least as measured by volume of candy and size of Easter baskets.

Dawn prepared an Easter basket for each of us, including the obligatory chocolate bunny. Lando ate his entire bunny that day; I still hadn't touched mine 2 weeks later. (I finally ate it yesterday.)

Mon, Mar 24 - Lando's Healthy

Dawn took Lando to Dr. Castaldo's for a followup exam after his bronchitis. Everything checked out fine.

Tue, Mar 25 - Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

Tuesdays are my nights to do what I want. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that I probably played Oblivion until midnight.

Wed, Mar 26 - Funshopless

Wednesdays normally mean Funshop, but this week was their "spring break", so no Funshop this time. Whenever there's a week without Funshop, we have to be careful not to use the word within earshot of Lando!

Thu, Mar 27 - Abducted Again

Umm.... If anything memorable happened, I don't remember it.

Fri, Mar 28 - And Again

Nada.

Sat, Mar 29 - RV & Camper Show

Every year we go to the RV & Camper Show, partly so that we can fantasize about actually going camping (*sigh*) and partly because it's an opportunity to get the heck out of the house, even if it might still be a bit cold outside. Normally the event is held in the Orr Building at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, but this year it was at the Prairie Capital Convention Center.

They've been having electrical problems at the fairgrounds, so they finally decided to just cancel all events for a few months and replace all of the wiring. They're planning on having everything reopened by May. Hopefully that's the case, because the Springfield Highland Games & Celtic Festival is held at the Fairgrounds every May!

For the last few years, Dad's brother, Uncle Jim, has traveled to Illinois to help out on of the guys who puts on the RV & Camper Show. This year, however, Uncle Jim had other plans, so he didn't make the trip. Hopefully we'll see him next year!

Lando had lots of fun running around in the various trailers. I took plenty of pictures, of course. Someday I might even post some of them.

Sun, Mar 30 - Damn Aliens!

My mind is a blank.

Mon, Mar 31 - Just Call Me "Dory"

Can't remember diddly.

So that was March!

Next time: The first week of April!

Whoosh! That was March. (Mostly.)

mood: busy
music: silence

At the end of my previous post (dated Feb 28), I wrote, "Other than the Very Important Topics, I'd also like to write about Springfield's planned winter farmer's market, rearranging our living room furniture, pizza toppings, and copying stuff from Tivo to DVD, but those topics will just have to wait for another day."

This is not that day. So here's a brief recap of how March went. A very brief recap.

Fri, Feb 29 - Vertigo

Dawn was sick with benign positional vertigo (aka getting dizzy and queasy every time you move your head), so stayed I stayed home from work to take care of Lando.

Sat, Mar 1 - Dinner with the Smiths

Dawn was quite a bit better, so we at dinner at Smiths' house.

Sun, Mar 2 - Vertigo

Dawn's vertigo was worse again, so we did pretty much nothing.

Mon, Mar 3 - Funshop Ice Skating

Dawn was quite a bit better, which was good news, because that morning was Funshop's ice skating event at Nelson Center. Originally Dawn had planned on putting on some skates and doing a bit of ice skating for the first time in many years, but the vertigo meant that would be a bad idea. As before, when we got there, Lando had no interest in going out on the ice.

We spent about 30 minutes with him in the lobby, where it was comparatively quiet (except for Lando, who was running around like a mad man), then another 30 minutes watching the other kids skating (except for Lando, who was running around like a mad man).

Just about the time we were thinking about calling it a day and going home, Lando decided he was ready to go out on ice. He only stayed out there about 20 minutes or so, but he quite enjoyed it. I took plenty of pictures, of course, but haven't gotten any of them posted yet!

Tue, Mar 4 - REALL

As usual, the first Tuesday of the month meant a meeting of REALL, the local skeptics group. I didn't have anything planned, so we just sat around and talked a bit.

Wed, Mar 5 - Funshop

Another Wednesday, another Funshop evening! However, due to the vertigo, Dawn isn't supposed to drive until at least a week after the last symptoms go away! That meant that, rather than meeting her at the Funshop building (which is not far from where I work), I had to drive home to pick up her and Lando, then drive back across town to Funshop. Not a big deal, but I normally have 30 minutes or so to read a book while I'm waiting. Oh well.

Thu, Mar 6 - Errands

I left work at 2:00 and ran a couple of errands. Exciting, huh? Um... I think I went to the post office. I bought stamps. Nobody died.

Fri, Mar 7 - Preschool Registration

This was something of a big day in Lando's life, and in ours. We went to registration for "Preschool in the Park" at Washington Park. This will begin in September, and will be just 2½ hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The "classes" are small (10 kids), so Lando will get plenty of attention. And because the classes are short, it will help ease Lando (and Dawn) into the idea of not spending the whole day together. :-)

Lando had plenty of fun playing with the toys that were out while we got him registered. Then when it was time to leave, he had a complete meltdown. *sigh*

Sat, Mar 8 - Moms Group Play Date

Dawn is running the Springfield Moms Meetup Group and had scheduled a play date at the mall for 9:00 am. White Oaks Mall recently installed a very nice soft play area for kids up to about age 6 or so. Scheduling it for 9:00 am meant that it didn't interfere with plans for the rest of the day, but it also meant getting up and moving somewhat earlier than perhaps some moms would like to on a Saturday. In addition to us, only 1 other mom showed up. She had 3 kids with her, so Lando had fun playing. Again, I took pictures. Again, I haven't posted any of them yet.

Sun, Mar 9 - Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time began! I don't care whether it saves energy or not; I like Daylight Saving Time! The extra hour of daylight after work just really helps me feel a bit less stressed out. Otherwise it feels like, "Get up, go to work, come home, time for bed!"

Mon, Mar 10 - Disk Drive and James Randi

I took the afternoon off to do two things.

One was to go to Best Buy and buy a hard drive. My PC has 600GB of disk space. Of that, it had reached the point where only about 5GB was unused. If you're wondering how I could be using 595GB of disk space, here's how: digital photos (I shoot in RAW format, which means each picture from my 8 megapixel camera uses about 7MB); digital music (I have about 300 CDs copied to disk); digital video; TIVO files; etc.

So, how much does half a terabyte of disk space cost these days? $130.

And since I was going to have enough space to actually do so, I picked up Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the first computer role-playing game I've bought in years.

The other reason I took the afternoon off was for a brief road trip to Champaign. Members of REALL and the Springfield Area Freethinkers carpooled over to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to see James Randi give a talk. Oh, and some Nobel Prize winner, too. :-) James Randi is a former magician who, among other things, exposed Uri Geller as being a fake, appeared on The Tonight Show numerous times, debunked dowsers, psychics, faith healers, psychic surgeons, hypnotists, etc. And he's a funny guy!

About 500-600 people turned out to see him. Afterwards he stayed around to chat, so I got a chance to talk with him a bit, had him sign my copy of his book Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, and got my picture taken with him. That picture and the numerous ones that I took of him are still waiting for me to post them. (But you already guessed that, didn't you?)

(Oh, the Nobel Prize winner? That was Richard J. Roberts, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing". Now you know.)

Tue, Mar 11 - Disk Drive and Oblivion

I installed the new 500GB hard drive in the computer. I really like the physical layout of my computer. It was definitely designed to make it easy to get to the components and install stuff. What a nice change!

Installing the hard drive was a snap. Now all I had to do was move some files from the old drive to the new drive. About 240GB of disk space was being used for digital photos, so I decided to move those. I decided to play it safe and copy them to their new location, rather than moving them, so I could verify that everything worked before I deleted the old copies.

However, after I started the copying process, I saw the time estimate: 180 minutes. That's right -- 3 hours! Okay, forget that. I canceled the copying process, reasoning that if it was going to take 3 hours, it could do so while I slept.

So I installed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and played it instead. It's fun! And now you know part of the reason why I've been unable to find time to post anything on my blog for the last few weeks.

Before I went to bed, I started the processing of moving the digital photos to the new drive. Because the process was going to take 3 hours, I decided to be brave and tell it to move the files rather than just copying them. (Yes, I know. Don't worry. It turns out okay.)

Wed, Mar 12 - Disk Drive, Sick Son, No Funshop

I woke up early and decided to check to see whether the digital photos had been successfully moved to the new disk drive. I walked into the office and saw a dialog box informing me that one of the files to be moved was a read-only file. Did I wish to move it anyway? Yes, damn it! *grumble* Luckily the read-only file showed up with only about 30 minutes left in the process, so it didn't cause a big problem.

After the files finished their move to the new drive, I started Photoshop Elements, then went into the organizer to tell it where all of the files had been moved. That's when I discovered that I had messed up. There is no way to tell the organizer, "hey, all of the files in this directory are now located in that other directory." Instead, you have to specify the new location one file at a time! As you might have guessed, with 240GB of digital photos, that would take quite a long time. The organizer catalog contains all kinds of information, such as the captions and keywords attached to each photo, so just ignoring the problem and starting over wasn't an option.

It turns out, what you're supposed to do is move the directory from within the organizer. *sigh* So that meant I had to move all of the files back to their original location (which took another 3 hours), then go back into Photoshop Elements and move the files yet again (which took yet another 3 hours). So all together it took 9 hours to get everything moved to the new disk drive!

Everything worked out in the end, though, and now I have plenty of room on both drives!

Another Wednesday, another Funshop session. However, Lando was sick, so no Funshop for us! (That was sort of good, because it meant that I could stay home and work on moving those files around!)

Thu, Mar 13 - Oblivion?

I'm drawing a blank here. I must have been playing Oblivion. Actually, Thursday is Dawn's night to do stuff, so probably I was keeping Lando entertained. And wanting to play Oblivion. :-)

Fri, Mar 14 - Er... Oblivion?

I suspect an alien abduction. Or more Oblivion.

Sat, Mar 15 - Sick Son, Play Date, Freethinkers

Dawn tried another play date at the mall, this time scheduling it for 9:30. However, Lando was sick, so he couldn't go. Since Dawn was the one who scheduled it, she figured she at least had to go. Unfortunately, nobody else showed up. *sigh*

Also, it was the third Saturday of the month, which meant another meetup of the Springfield Area Freethinkers. There was a pretty good turnout this time. I think the receding winter weather is making people feel more like getting out, even if "getting out" means "going to the Buffet King and eating lunch."

I suggested that for the April meetup we get together somewhere quiet where we can listen to the CD of Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God. Remember the Saturday Night Live routine, "It's Pat"? That was Julia Sweeney. Anyway, she now does a standup act where she talks about her spiritual journey from being a Catholic to becoming an atheist. (Her transition began, ironically, with her decision to attend Bible study classes at her church. Oops.) Anyway, we'll be getting together at Janet's house to listen. And because Janet's house isn't a restaurant, it will be BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch).

Sun, Mar 16 - Um... Oblivion?

Nope, I can't think of anything that happened on this day.

Mon, Mar 17 - St. Patrick's Day, Early Riser

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I went to work, of course. When I left, everyone was still asleep. Later, Lando got up, went into the living room, and sat on the couch. Dawn eventually woke up to the sound of him calling out, "Is anybody home?" :-)

Tue, Mar 18 - My Night

We didn't feel like cooking, so I swung by Panera Bread and got us dinner. Every other Tuesday evening the Schwan's delivery guy comes by. We're pretty much limiting ourselves to pizzas and ice cream these days. Definitely not local and definitely not whole foods, but definitely very tasty!

Oh, and I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion until midnight.

Wed, Mar 19 - Funshop, Playing Outside, Super Size Me

Another Wednesday, another Funshop evening. The weather was nice enough that Lando was able to play outside for a bit after we got home.

At work, I have a 30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks. My computer has a DVD drive, so sometimes I'll bring a DVD to watch. Today I watched the first hour of Super Size Me. So far, wow! Here's the trailer:

To Be Continued...

I started writing this post a long time ago. March 19, actually. It's pretty much sat untouched ever since. Well, I'm not caught up yet, but rather than risk letting this sit around any longer, I'm going to go ahead and post it now. You'll just have to wonder how the rest of March turned out. Pretend that it's a cliffhanger!